Multimedia Calls For Digital Creativity

Technology rules the world these days. Everywhere you look, there surely is a tech gadget that dominates that aspect of life. While we revel on the comfort and convenience many of these tech advancements give us, they may have some unwanted flaws we aren’t so thrilled about. But still, we continue to support and patronize these advancements because they make the world go round today.

A popular aspect of technology almost everyone can relate to is multimedia and for good reason too considering they are the most entertaining of all. And over the years, multimedia has shown what and how much we have accomplished in the field, from old-school multi-media presentations, projectors and photography, and now interactive multimedia. It is the creative expression of the digital technology that almost all enterprises and institutions use today.

This year, students ranging from kindergarten to high school submitted 286 projects in this year’s fair, up from 172 projects in 2016. Students submitted projects in six categories: digital presentation, digital art, motion media, video game design, digital music and website design.

Other schools should also consider having this multimedia fair in their own backyards to help familiarize the students with this digital technology even further and make them feel comfortable in using it. It makes perfect sense to expose the youth to these advancements because technology is a big aspect of our lives and will only likely advance further rather than disappear. If they learn about these things at an early age, they won’t have a hard time keeping up with all the tech changes around us and can even make a promising career of it too.

Part of NASA’s mission includes educating the public on space exploration. Present the agency’s high-quality images, videos and audio files from 50 years of space exploration was a challenge, however, as the multimedia files were housed in 10 different NASA field centers.

Working with InfoZen, the space agency was able to make available 140,000 downloadable images, video and audio files through the searchable images.NASA.govsite.

“Over the course of a couple of decades, our imagery was scattered over NASA.gov so you would have to likely to have the image that you were looking for,” Rodney Grubbs, NASA’s imagery experts program manager, told GCN. “It was inefficient for NASA, the taxpayer and frustrating for everyone involved, so we set about a way to solve the problem and create something that was scalable for mobile.” Hosted in Amazon Web Services cloud and using Limelight Network’s content delivery service, the searchable database uses infrastructure as code to support a wide variety of formats for photos, audio and videos.

People often think of multimedia as a form of digital entertainment that is all over the world right now. And there is actually nothing wrong with that perception since it is true. However, there is more to multimedia than just keeping most of us entertained when we have nothing better to do with our lives. Multimedia can also be used in the education of the youth, similar to what the above school multimedia fair tried to achieve.

More ambitious scientific quests can likewise benefit from multimedia in the documentation and presentation of their scientific exploits. Space, in particular, has a lot of use for multimedia in showing everybody else on the planet what life is like out in the vast realms of space. It is hard for our minds to understand something we have not seen yet or were not aptly described to us in vivid detail, so multimedia takes care of that obstacle for the benefit of everybody.